Archive for February, 2008
JV Plus
Wow. I just stayed up all night creating a product, debugging it, writing the instruction manual for it, making the sales copy, and setting up the payment process.
The product I just made is called JV Plus. It allows you to turn ANY site (even this blog) into an affiliate program... cool, right?
Try it out. Just take ANY page on this site... for example:
http://www.robertplank.com/jv-plus
And stick your Clickbank ID in the "www"... for example...
http://stevenss.robertplank.com/jv-plus
Now you get credit for the sale of ANY of my Clickbank enabled-products I link to from my site! (Almost half of my products are on Clickbank.)
This script drops right in to any site... it doesn't matter what kind of site it is. I've never seen anything like this script before... that's why I made it!
You can check out the product here:
http://www.JVPlus.com
Okay, it's contest time. I deliberately violated one of the copywriting rules in Fast Food Copywriting on the JV Plus sales page... can you figure out what it is?
Winner Announced: Mark Squance guessed that the "big mistake" I made on that page was having a video longer than 2 minutes. He won a free copy of JV Plus plus $20 sent to his PayPal account.
Fast Food Copywriting
Late last night I launched a special report called Fast Food Copywriting.
That product is something that started out as a blog COMMENT just a few days ago. I didn't even mean for it to be a complete blog post.
One of our discussions meandered into copywriting, and I typed up a quick response to quickly go over my personal formula for writing quick sales copy that's good enough to get the job done. Nothing fancy.
After the blog comment ended up being a couple of pages, I said to myself: "I'll just make this a blog post." I saved it to my drafts.
I came back to the draft later and edited it some more. Even when I said what I wanted to say with as few words as possible, it ended up being several pages long.
I moved it to a Word document, made the page margins as thin as I could and the font size as small (but still readable) as I could... and I thought, heck, maybe I should sell this thing as its own report.
The offer has been live for about 9 hours and sold 50 copies -- about 750 bucks. Not bad for a few hours of "smart" (not hard) work.
Update: After 48 hours I now have 104 sales
which comes to around $1400 after fees.
What does this tell me about infoproduct creation?
- The best products I have ever made were answers (solutions) to real live questions (problems). This does like a "duh" point but I know that the very best books and reports I made started out as replies on forums or blog posts... then got carried away... then I said, it would be criminal for this info to get buried in a forum after a couple of days.
- Keep your "sexy" information private and your boring information public. Perfect example: I gave away some WordPress SEO advice yesterday but saved the copywriting info for a paid report. Setting up blogs and sites are fun, but people get more excited about things that are going to make them money NOW and improve THEIR lives.
- Have a backend. I have always been kind of a crappy marketer when it came to marketing my e-books... but not in 2008! I made sure to plug-in an affiliate program just before launching. I embedded the affiliate code in the e-book so that the call-to-action at the end is for the reader to promote the book as an affiliate.
Since Fast Food Copywriting is my only copywriting product, I don't have any upsells to push into so we'll see how the perpetual affiliate program idea works out.
Speaking of upsells, I have been working on my product funnel and tweaked the sales letters for Black Hat PHP, Lightning PHP, Impact PHP and Push Button PHP so that they all on their own upsell to PHP in a Box, a package containing all those products in one. It's a pretty sweet setup.
Income so far for this month: From my PayPal daily sales report anyway... $9,807.46 $10,377.58 with 547 585 sales. After fees that's $9,300 $9,700. (I find it funny that the money I pay in PayPal fees is approaching the amount I pay for rent.)
Add Clickbank and day job income and I've broken $12,000 $12,500 for this month.
I have 8 Warrior Special Offers running at the moment.
If you want to get your hands on the special report and find out the step-by-step method I use to become a copywriting machine and pump out these cash-sucking sales letters... check out Fast Food Copywriting.
In the meantime, could you do me a favor and comment on this entry and tell me:
Are you giving away the farm by dishing out too much free information, or are you saving "the good stuff" for paying customers?
Have you ever written a forum reply, blog post, or free report and said to yourself... "I should charge for this!" Please, tell me the story of how it came to be and share the URL where the product is selling now.
WordPress Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
It looks like a lot of the people who comment here have their own WordPress blogs. I was recently asked by Lou Dalo:
What Do You Do to Make Your Blog Search-Engine Friendly?
If you are a marketer and you don't have even a simple blog, you are committing marketing suicide.
Reasons Why:
Product Launches, Name Recognition, Sales Momentum
Reason #1: Thanks to pinging, new blog posts get indexed in a matter of hours, not days. This means if you link from a blog post to a new product, that sales letter gets indexed quickly as well.
If you own a blog... try it! Make a post, then later in the day go to Google and type in the post title as a search phrase. I guarantee you, within 8 hours your blog post will be listed.
Reason #2: Many people will do research on a product and Google your name before they buy something. In 2004 I added Simple PHP Volume 1 into the eBookWholesaler membership site and got a flood of sales and newsletter opt-ins... even though there was no link to my site!
People Googled my name and found my site. If you have a blog and mention your products, they'll find your blog when looking for your products.
Reason #3: On your blog you have a list of all your products so people who have bought product #1 can find product #2 and product #3 and product #4. This means you get repeat sales.
Register YourName.com This Instant...
Before Someone Else Grabs It and Makes It Into A Porn Site!
I could go on and on with the reasons. If YourName.com is available, register it now and stick a simple WordPress blog on it today. I don't care if you don't have anything to put on it yet. Through all of 2007, RobertPlank.com contained nothing but my personal resume. When I was ready to write a blog, I finally did.
Who cares if your blog is brand new and only has one post on it? If you are building a list like you should be doing, it doesn't matter if you take 6 months to write another blog post because you can send a quick mailing to your list and they'll come right back.
Great, you know how important a blog is, you have a blog setup, now let's make a couple of tweaks to give you a huge advantage other the 99% of bloggers who post garbage...
There is a lot of free info about WordPress search engine optimization floating around, but some of the information is crap.
I took some of the best advice and several of my blog posts have jumped from page 2 in Google to page 1. One went from spot #5 to spot #1.
Here is EXACTLY what I did to my blog to make it search engine friendly:
SEO Tip #1: Permalinks
If you only make ONE change to your blog today, make this change.
By default, WordPress tries to link to your posts using a numeric ID which I just hate.
What you need to do is go to Options, Permalinks... then specify a Custom permalink structure with this value:
/%postname%/
They will give you special HTACCESS code to upload to your site if you haven't messed around with permalinks already.
Making that change in WordPress will make your posts look like:
http://www.example.com/your-post-title
Instead of:
http://www.example.com/?p=38
SEO Tip #2: Edit the TITLE Tag
My most effective SEO change by far was changing the code for the TITLE tag.
By default, WordPress sets your TITLE tag as: Blog Name » Post Title. You don't want that. That's what's going to appear in the search engine results! If you write a post called "SEO" you want the title to be just "SEO" ... not "Site Name » SEO."
Edit your header.php template and replace your TITLE tag with this:
<title>
<?php if (is_home()): ?>
<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>: <?php bloginfo('description') ?>
<?php elseif (is_category()): ?>
<?php wp_title(''); ?>: <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
<?php elseif (is_date()): ?>
<?php wp_title(''); ?>: <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
<?php else: ?>
<?php wp_title(''); ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</title>
SEO Tip #3: Edit the META Tags
I added a meta tag inside the HEAD tag of the HTML code... again, in header.php... to prevent duplicate content penalties. This code:
<?php if ((is_home() || is_single() || is_page()) && (!is_paged())) {
echo '<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />';
} else {
echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />';
}?>
... Will tell search engine robots to spider the front page, individual posts, categories, and so on... but STAY AWAY from pages where you can leave a comment... as well as categories. The contents of those pages are going to look almost exactly the same.
SEO Tip #4: Edit robots.txt
One last change I made to my blog was the robots.txt file. I told robots to stay out of the WordPress control panel and the template folders. This will make sure that the only search results for your site are REAL content pages, no junk pages.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content
Disallow: /tag
Disallow: /author
Disallow: /i/
Disallow: /f/
Disallow: /t/
Disallow: /wget/
Disallow: /httpd/
Disallow: /c/
Disallow: /j/
Disallow: /*/de/
Disallow: /*/ru/
Disallow: /*/nl/
Disallow: /*/zh/
Disallow: /*/ko/
Disallow: /*/ja/
Disallow: /*/pt/
Disallow: /*/it/
Disallow: /*/fr/
Disallow: /*/es/# Google Image
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:
Allow: /*# Google AdSense
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
Allow: /*
You might want to take that last bit out if you use AdSense on your blog.
Thanks to Andy for pointing out that tips #3 and #4 can be very well managed using the meta robots plugin.
More WordPress Tips for Marketing Blogs
- Use a blog template that shows the title of the site inside the H1 tag, and the post title inside the H2 tag.
- Have your sidebar on the right side, not the left.
- Link to previous posts when possible to make sure all your pages get indexed.
- Put an opt-in form in place of where you would normally stick AdSense.
- Send an e-mail to your list when you make a blog post to get them to comment on it. See the 10-comment rule.
If you've made the above changes to your blog, go ahead and leave a comment with the URL to your blog that's now all SEO'd out.
Black Hat PHP
If you're wondering how the launch of Black Hat PHP went... it brought in 186 sales for the main product ($1,616.10) and 6 sales ($562.37) for the $97 upsell, for a total of 192 sales and $2,178.47. That's calculated after taking fees into account.
I priced this one slightly higher (start at 7 cents and increase by 10 cents) because I wanted to get more money out of it over a slower period of time.
I made almost exactly $2,400 in sales total yesterday.... that's from one day! If you're wondering how I'm doing for the entire month, I've brought in $8,241.26 in gross sales for February 2008 which is $7,837.90 after fees.
Factor my day job income after that and it means that even if I take the next week off, this month was yet another $10k month for me.
I can tell you right now that having the 10-comment rule on this blog has made that level of income much easier to attain than in 2007, because:
- I'm building a list -- I've always built a list but the blog is yet another list-building source.
- I'm more motivated to pump out new products and write new sales letters because if I don't, I feel like I'm letting REAL PEOPLE down.
- Having the blog posts available permanently, instead of temporarily when I send out a mailing to my list, means those blog posts can slowly bring in sales over time.
I can't tell you how important number three is. Before starting a blog, I noticed lots of $2000 weeks and lots of $500 weeks in my PayPal income reports. Now it is more like $1500 weeks every single week.
That's much more reliable income. When I first started making big sales on the internet, I'd have a couple of days during a launch when I would pull in $1000 or $2000 in a day, then no more money would come in for the rest of the month.
Check out Black Hat PHP if you missed the big launch. It's quickly approaching the $20 price range so act fast.
Also, can you comment below and tell me if you are making any efforts to stabilize your income, going for steady streams instead of short bursts?
- Are you looking into AdWords or some other form of paid advertising?
- Do you have a blog?
- Do you have an affiliate program that's promoted directly from your e-book?
- Do you offer upsells or one-time-offers... do you have a product funnel?
- Do you have a membership site?
The 10-Comment Rule
This blog has what I call "The 10-Comment Rule."
I Post a Blog Entry, But I Don't Post Another One
Until the Original Post Gets 10 Comments.
I have the ten-comment rule because I'm just like you and have been to loser forums with tons of posts and zero replies to all of them.
On a blog, there's less focus on the replies and more on the original post, but that "empty restaurant" effect is still there.
- Participation. If someone fills out a comment to a post of mine, they're no longer just surfing. They are now in interactive mode and are more likely to buy from me if I mention a product.
- Search Engine Food. Search engines love lots and lots of content, and with comments, your pages can become much longer than the original post... that means more keyword matches for you and more search engine listings.
- Intrigue. If you see lots of comments on posts you are more likely to read them, which means you spend more time on my site, which means you're more likely to see something you like.
Remember, your blogs are there to make you money. Update it and tell people about yourself, tell them what stuff you are working on and what products you have just put out. Try to work a call-to-action at the end of every blog post. Either you want to send them to a sales letter of yours, sign up to a mailing list or subscribe to an RSS feed.
If you are talking about someone else's blog or site, mention that in the BEGINNING of the post. Don't make that your final call to action (unless it's an affiliate link).
Don't forget to apply what you know about selling and direct response sales letters to content site and blogs:
- Try not to link out to too many sites. On the blogroll on the right side of the page, link only to your own products.
- Offsite linking includes "chicklets." Have one chicklet, i.e. "Digg this." But not: "Add to My Yahoo!" ... "Add to Reddit!" ... "Add to Bloglines" ... and so on. That's
- Build up a mailing list and send an e-mail to that list every time you make a new post.
- Stay away from AdSense. AdSense is for people too lazy to build a list and make a product. Believe me, that was me too at one point.
I researched how to make WordPress more optimized for search engines:
- I added meta tags to the header and made a robots.txt file to prevent duplicate content penalties.
- I changed the permalink configuration so the full URL of the post was actually revelant.
- I tweaked the template so there wouldn't be a bunch of extra text in the TITLE tag.
Got it? Your blog is just another part of your business, it's not "just for fun." It can be fun but it has a purpose:
- To present yourself as an authority figure in your niche. (BRAND YOURSELF.)
- To capture untamed search engine traffic and funnel it into a list or to your other products.
- To maintain a relationship with your list and past buyers. When you update them every once in a while, they remember who you are.
A minor side effect is that sometimes the conversation will meander off-topic and give you an idea for your next blog post.
Try your own 10-comment rule if you have a blog. My 10-comment rule works because I have a list of 10,000 subscribers (66% buyers) so you might have to make it a 5-comment rule if you have a smaller list.
Or, the ten comment rule might just mean that you can only post one blog per month. You can spend the rest of the month creating products, building up a list, and maybe advertising for your blog.
Seriously, what is the point of doing ANYTHING if no one is going to read it, or if they're going to just read it and lurk and not say anything about it?
Action PopUp
Is it possible to take an old outdated idea and put your own twist on it?
The thing is, I hate opt-in forms that take me off the current page. Luckily there has been a rise of Ajax-based and iframe-based subscription boxes in the last couple of years where you can fill out an opt-in form and you are NOT taken away from the page you are on.
In August of last year I first released Action PopUp.
Strategy #1: See If They Buy It In the First Place
I didn't know if it would sell well or not... the only real way to find out is to test it with a version 1.0 and see if people buy!
I am not a fan of releasing a free report, or offering nothing but a newsletter in your niche... just make a simple product, price it accordingly (a low price if it's a simple early version of your product) and see if people are willing to pay money for it!
There's really no other way to know for sure.
I launched on August 15th, 2007. It was a dimesale, the price was $7.99 plus a 2 cent price increase with each sale. The launch lasted for two weeks, totaling 242 sales at $2,504 profit ($2,348.36 after PayPal fees).
$2500 for two days of work? I definitely consider that a success! It was something people actually wanted to buy (instead of just saying they would buy it -- beware of this).
Strategy #2: Feature Creep
Because it was a new source of income, I knew I would spend the time to develop it more.
I slowly added new features and released them for free to my existing buyers. This is how you should roll out all your products: software OR information products.
I've developed the heck out of this idea and it's now at version 1.5 with a price of $13.31.
Strategy #3: Eating Your Own Dog Food
I added an option to make it work directly on a page, instead of as a pop-up... which is how I use it on this blog. When someone reads a post, they have a chance to subscribe to my newsletter for updates. Once they do, the subscription box disappears.
Action PopUp personalizes any web page (including this blog) after you fill out the subscription form... and remembers it for future visits.
You might have noticed it already... for example, on one of my posts, I start with this sentence:
"Don't forget, it's okay to make mistakes."
If you are reading the actual entry (not just on the front page)... after you fill out the newsletter box... let's say your name was Steven... the blog entry now reads:
"Steven, it's okay to make mistakes."
The more I used it on my own sites, I found I kept adding little "tweaks" in the script to get it to do what I want... these tweaks eventually became advertised features.
I added a one-time-offer countdown, link capture functionality, a delay-onload pop-up... only when I needed them for my sites.
Have you heard of the phrase, "Eating your own dog food?" It means if you use your own products, they will kick ass. Dog food tastes like crap, but if you were a dog food company and all you had to eat was your own dog food, you would tweak it to make sure it tastes great.
Action PopUp was something I actually used on my sites, so with all the unintentional self-testing I performed, I weeded most of the bugs, added features that people like me would actually use, and made it as easy to install as possible.
It's because of those three simple strategies that I am able to consistently pump out products.
Are You A Professional Newbie?
Don't forget, it's okay to make mistakes. When you break into any niche you have to deal with a learning curve and the only way to learn the most important things in life is to make mistakes doing them.
A "professional newbie" is someone who never wises up, never figures out what they are good at, and doesn't belong in the niche they are in.
Are You a Professional Newbie?
There are people in the internet marketing niche, in the stock trading niche, and in the programming niche who lurk on message boards who have no idea what they are talking about, who post on blogs and have no idea what they are talking about.
In internet marketing, a professional newbie is someone who gets hyped up about AdSense, makes some sites for a few weeks and then gets bored. He gets hyped up by another guru about article marketing, writes some articles, but that doesn't make him any money so he moves onto the next thing.
The professional newbie tries Squidoo, blogging, Craigslist, eBay, Forex, AdWords, Clickbank, PLR, ELance, all only for a few months all with no results.
Oh look... a rock over there... oh wait... another rock over there.
Idiot professional newbies spend all their time "thrashing" from idea to idea without any focus. They don't accomplish anything besides losing money.
I read someone's blog in the stock trading niche who is a professional newbie and probably always will be. He follows the advice of random strangers who post comments on his blog and invests tens of thousands of dollars into some stock he has hardly even heard of, but was given "a tip" that it will make him a bunch of money.
Usually it blows up in his face.
Do you make this same mistake in your niche?
(That newbie whose blog I follow was ahead $200,000 at one point and is now almost $500,000 in debt.)
I see the same mistake in the software niche...
- Professional newbies switch from project to project.
- Professional newbies begin learning how to program, but they get bored and switch around to some other languages.
- Professional newbies want to make their products so perfect that they never get launched.
- Professional newbies want to make the most unique product there is... the only problem is... it's a stupid hair-brained idea and no one wants it.
I could go on forever. In every niche there you are going to deal with a LOT of noise. Moreso if the niche is in any way profitable, because that means others can prey on you -- they profit from your inexperience.
Don't be a professional newbie. Stick to one single project for a month, get off your butt and do some work.
If you have a niche you've always wanted to break into, spend 1-2 days writing a short report and create a sloppy sales page. Send some traffic to it and see if that path is worth pursuing.
Find out what niche you are good at and like.
The only way you are going to get anywhere is by working hard and working smart. You need both. If you work smart but not hard, you're a philosopher. If you work hard but not smart, you're a McDonald's employee.
DO SOMETHING! Stay focused. Don't even think about what your next product will be until the one you're working on now is launched and is selling.
One last thing. You need to know where you want to end up. Do you want to host seminars on your topic, do you want to produce an autoshipped monthly CD series? Do you want to do freelancing and then move up to high-end paid consulting? Or do you just want to sell off the rights to your products and bail out at some point?
It's like a map, you need to know your start point and your end point, and always be on a road that is getting you one step closer to that end point. Just one little step in the right direction.
You can't possibly be thinking about every single road you're going to take to that destination... but on the other hand you can't turn at every single street hoping it will lead you somewhere.
My friend Steven Schwartzman has this problem of taking action... so recently when he had a great idea for a niche to break into, I told him to make the small report, get it out there as sloppily and as quickly as possible, and see if it takes off.
I have been building my business just a little bit every day. I don't think I'm ever going to go full time in internet marketing but I want to build a bigass product funnel, get into physical products then maybe hit some seminars. I don't want to host seminars or speak at any.
The way for me to get there is with more video products, which is why I have been upgrading my e-books to video packages. So far this month I have released Simple JavaScript, Sales Page Tactics Volume 1 and Sales Page Tactics Volume 2 as video products.
I'm not going to try to break into any other niches at this time or pursue any weird projects right now like a membership site. I'm not going to go back to freelancing or put effort into any big joint ventures because that's not the direction I want to be headed towards... but that's just me personally.
What you want with your sites, your products and your niche is going to be way different than what I want.
Simple JavaScript
A week ago I made a very subtle change to my blog. You probably didn't even notice it, I bet. I moved the link on the right side for "Simple JavaScript" from the e-books to the video infoproducts category.
That wasn't a mistake.
I went back and recorded the videos for it. So, do you have any old e-books that you can update for the year 2008 and record some quick videos for?
They don't need to be super great. All I have is an out of date copy of Camtasia 4 and a USB headset. I open my PDF e-book to the beginning of the chapter, read the title and the first couple of paragraphs, then get to work, actually performing the steps the book tells me to, step by step.
I am very liberal with the pause button. I read part of the book and then do exactly as the book says, explaining what I'm doing as I'm doing it. Sometimes I'll ad-lib some comment, or go on a rant, or notice something I didn't notice when I wrote the instructions -- but did notice when I actually performed them. (Yet another reason why videos are such a valuable part of any infoproduct.)
People are lazy. If they can watch something instead of reading something, they'll be more interested in it.
My videos aren't award winning or clever. They really aren't that great. But they're good enough -- remember "it doesn't have to look good, just be good?"
I wasn't even decent in my earliest videos. In the winter of 2005 (I think) I recorded about 20 hours of PHP videos that just stunk. I don't even have them anymore. In retrospect I probably should have at least sold away the rights to them.
But I recorded the videos with the intention of selling them. You shouldn't record videos just for the purpose of wasting time and keeping yourself from building your business.
Video takes practice just the same as it takes practice to write well. It probably took an additional 3 or 4 video infoproducts to get it right. Now I don't mumble, I project my voice as well as I can and I speak slowly enough in the videos that I don't trip over my own words or click my mouse around too much like a babbling idiot.
My videos used to take 25 takes on average to get right, now I get through them in one take. Okay, I'll admit that every now and then I will screw up and have to record a second take.
- You can record videos for your old infoproducts and double their perceived value.
- You can avoid what Willie Crawford calls "The $20 E-Book Syndrome."
- You can create products that include audio, video, physical materials or DVDs that sell for $97 instead of $27... that require only 10% more work for you to make.
No one cares if you sound stupid as long as they understand you and you have something interesting to say. If you "get excited about your topic," that's no big deal.
I find that if I try to record a bunch of videos in a row, I get tired and just try to plow through them. They end up feeling substandard and rushed... not good. If you sound rushed and eager to finish the video, you don't sound like you're excited about your topic.
Instead, record a 10 minute video and then do something physical for 10 minutes (hey, let's not get dirty now).
You need to recharge your batteries.
- Record a 10 minute video then get in your car and drive around the block for 10 minutes.
- Record another 10 minute video then go have dinner.
- Record another 10 minute video, then mow the lawn.
- Record yet another 10 minute video, then buy groceries.
Even if you could only set aside time to record one video per day, you could convert your old boring e-books to exciting video information products. That's what I'm going to do this month.
I haven't blogged all week because I didn't want to talk myself out of doing this, but I have three more old e-books that are ready to be converted into video products. I have them all recorded and uploaded as of last night, I just have to work on the sales letters for them, one at a time.
I'll be re-launching Sales Page Tactics Volume 1 with video within the hour -- it's probably already out by the time you read this.
Do you have plans to record just one video per day to breathe new life into an old product? Comment on this entry below and tell me what you are working on.
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